“You’re not wearing your flip-flops,” she said to him.
“I would die for you,” said James.
These were the words that came to him, and so he said them, aloud, on the way to Erin’s father’s funeral. He wasn’t sure why — because this was what he felt at the time? He’d damn near been ruined by something someone said to him that she felt at the time, and this wasn’t even the worst of what he’d just done. Bringing up dying at a time like this?
Erin looked over at him, her eyes slitted behind her shades. Then she looked the other way, out the window, and drained her beer, and opened another.
“I’m sorry,” said James, “I meant. . .”
“No, don’t,” she said. “Don’t talk. Just put on the flip-flops I bought for you.”
He steered with his knees in order to slip off his sneakers and socks. When he had the flip-flops on she reached across and patted him on the knee, as if to say, There now, all better.
• • •
THEY’D EACH HAD three beers when the air began to smell of sea. They hadn’t been talking. Erin had cranked up Sticky Fingers and they’d sung a warbly duet to “Wild Horses.”
Her town announced itself in fits of fish camp and motor court.
“Tell me where to turn,” he said.
“Take the beach road,” she said. “I want to get wet.”
“I mean, aren’t they expecting you?”
“I’m always late,” she said.
She wasn’t lying. She’d been late to work twice and had only been working there a couple of weeks. In fact, Monroe, the manager, had told one of the other waitresses that Erin wasn’t really working out. Now’s my chance, James remembered thinking when he’d moved down the bar to ask her about her bicycle. It was only last night, but it seemed months ago. He wondered how long ago it seemed to her. She’d said she had a different concept of time. Plus — he had to keep reminding himself of this — her father had died. Trauma does strange things to the clock. When he’d been sick, when he’d done nothing but lie in bed and sweat, that intolerable stretch between late morning and three o’clock, when he could hear the school buses lumbering up and down the streets, the squeals of schoolchildren, the sounds of his housemates drifting in from class, had lasted days.
At the beach she directed him to a motel called the Atlantis.
“I assume you’re staying the night at least?” she said.
“I haven’t really thought that far ahead.”
“I was under the impression that you had the next decade planned out.”
“I mean, I guess I ought to hang around and sleep off the beer.”
“You always start your sentences with ‘I mean.’ What do you mean?”
James swallowed. He felt unduly perturbed by her question, which after all was innocent enough. He got out of the truck without answering and slapped his way across the hot parking lot, the flip-flops sliding off his feet.
Inside the room he went to the bathroom and stayed there for a while, allowing her time to change into her suit. He knocked before he came back out — it seemed the right thing to do — but Erin, in answer, said, “Who’s there?”
“I’m coming out,” he said, and he heard her laughter, and then the door opened and she stepped naked into the bathroom and pushed him against the sink.
They lay in the sagging bed listening to Casey Kasem on the clock radio. She got up during a commercial and put on her suit. When James got up to join her, she said, “Do you mind if I go by myself?”
“Not at all,” he said.
She stuffed her clothes into her backpack. “I’ll just ride my bike home. It’s just across the bridge, on the waterway.”
“Oh, I don’t mind dropping you off, I mean . . .”
“I know you mean everything you say,” she said, and he remembered telling her he’d die for her, and he felt the itchy heat of shame prickling his skin, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them she was standing by the door staring at his bony torso. He knew she was wondering what was wrong with him. He could tell she wanted to ask.
“Okay, well,” he said. “Hey, I’ll be around if you want to drop by.”
James got up and fished the extra key from the pocket of his jeans.
“I’m not going back till tomorrow sometime, I mean, I know you’ll be busy with your family and all but . . .”
“I’ll see you later, then,” she said, and she was gone.
He woke hours later to the sound of her key in the lock. It was dark out, the room lit only by streetlights strained through drapery, and James heard car radios, shouts, the night noises of beach towns. He was hungry and his head throbbed. He asked Erin what time it was, asked if she slept — after all, they’d been up for more than twenty-four hours before she left for her swim — but she did not answer him. She was stripping off her clothes and then she was alongside him in bed.
Maybe it was fatigue, or perhaps it was patience, even compassion — his desire for her to get what she needed, to provide her with some fleeting bliss in this difficult time — but James lasted forever. They kept at it for well over an hour. It wasn’t the most satisfying love James had ever made, but it was different from anything he’d experienced. More physical, less self-conscious. It wasn’t violent or rough, but there was a force beneath their movements, a purpose far beyond the kind of pleasurable distraction from his problems that had led him to take a seat next to her on the barstool and, a couple hours later, stumble up the stairs to the garage apartment.
In time he figured it out: She wasn’t there. She was trying to show up. Beneath him was only vapor, only her aggressive need to materialize. It was not desire, really — at least not desire for him — but it wasn’t desperation, either. Somewhere between the two. It left him feeling weightless. Weightlessness was not something he needed to feel. He cataloged what usually motivated the friction of lovers — desire, vanity, ego, athleticism. Love, fifth and lonely on his list. He lay worrying in her arms as she slept and realized, too late, that it had to do with grief.
When he woke again she was gone. He put on his swimsuit and went out to the beach, which was empty save for a few older women seeking shells. James realized that it was Sunday, that he really should be leaving soon, but he couldn’t very well leave without saying good-bye. He went for a quick swim and spent the rest of the day sitting by the pool, watching the room, scanning the beach road for her bike.
Near dark he called the restaurant and asked to speak to Brian, the line cook.
“Where you been, man?” said Brian. “I tried to find you last night, but your roommates said you disappeared.”
“I’m down at the beach.”
“Wish I was. Hey, that one chick’s dad died.”
“Which one chick?”
“The one you were talking to the other night. Where did y’all get to anyhow?”
“I walked her home.”
“Yeah, well, her dad died. Least she said so. She’s going to get canned, man.”
“Because her dad died?”
“Monroe said he was going to fire her anyway.”
“Why?”
“I guess because she sucks at waitressing? Plus, she’s weird, right? Hey, aren’t you supposed to open tomorrow? You better get your ass back up here, man, he’ll fire you, too.
“Save him the trouble,” said James. “Pick up my check for me, will you? I’ll call you in a couple of days.”
James hung up the phone and sat at the edge of the bed, considering his role. She needed a ride; he’d given her a ride. She needed him to be there, in bed, so that she could prove something to herself that he knew had nothing at all to do with him. Maybe it had little to do with her father’s death. He thought of a term he’d heard his father, who sold insurance, use: a preexisting condition. We’re all carrying around these preexisting conditions, James decided, which are irritated or soothed by the next thing we happen to come into contact with. The thing was, he wasn’t sure if he was irritant to her, or sa
lve. He only knew he felt purposeful enough to put on his interview suit and the gray flip-flops she gave him and wait for her return.
But she did not turn up for hours. Restless, James took a walk on the boardwalk. His interview suit was a couple of years old, bought when he was twenty pounds heavier; in the ocean breeze it flapped around him like a sail. James sweated in the light summer wool. He could smell his dress shirt, sour and yellowing around his armpits. The flip-flops hurt his feet, but he felt he wore exactly the right outfit for a man in his situation. The suit suggested compassion, sympathy, even commitment. As for the rubber shoes, well, he’d wear them until they blew out, as flip-flops inevitably did, and then he’d save them forever in a closet bottom, a reminder of the lightness of love, the low cost of its initial investment, the frivolity and giddiness of it even in the face of trauma and hardship.
In an oceanfront, open-air bar, James sat drinking orange juice in case the funeral was today. He did not want her to come for him and smell vodka on his breath. He angled his stool away from the view of the ocean, toward the boardwalk, so that he might see Erin if she came searching for him. The half drunks who came and went in groups, wearing bathing suits and T-shirts with the names of other beach bars, stared at him derisively. James wasn’t bothered, as they all seemed so clueless, so uninitiated into this world he’d discovered through motives that were admittedly less than pure. Or were they? James faced the boardwalk, trying to decide if he was wrong to move down the bar that night, if this fullness he felt, this new purposefulness, were merely the result of chance, rather like a lottery, or if he had been delivered to Erin, if their respective needs — her grief, his illness — had magnetized them.
Well, what did it matter now? Here he was, at the beach, drinking orange juice as the sun set over the arcade facing him, redeeming in its final wash the very skin it had ravaged all day long on the faces and arms of the drunken boardwalk throngs. He decided just to trust this moment of sun, though he was out of work, low on funds, dressed like a homeless insane preacher.
Because they didn’t hold funerals at night — at least James had never attended one — he motioned for the bartender to add a little vodka to the juice. All day long he’d been attracting drunks, who seemed drawn to his eccentric dress, as if anyone dressed this way at the beach had a story to tell. He’d waved them off until his third screwdriver, after which James found himself surrounded, slapping high fives with sweaty strangers, giving hugs to girls who went by their initials—B. J, T. J., even an O. J.—who wore bikini tops and cut-offs.
“Well, the seventies are over,” said James.
“We’re up to 1981, preacherman,” said a squat black guy who had taught him an elaborate, multipart handshake. “You been on vacation?”
“I’m just saying, I’m glad to be shy of that decade. Aren’t you?” he asked one of the bikini-topped girls.
“She just takes it one night at a time,” said B. J. or T. J. about her friend, who smiled easily at everything James said, as if his attire made him seem unusually amusing.
It was late when he returned to the room. He was drunk enough not to notice Erin, curled up under the covers, the air-conditioning cranked high.
She was watching him undress. She laughed a little at the clumsy unknotting of his tie.
“Where’ve you been?” Her emphasis on the you suggested playfulness but underneath he detected need.
“I didn’t catch the name of it,” he said. “Everybody there seemed to go by their initials, though.”
“That could be any place down here,” she said. She reached for his hand and yanked. He fell across her, but she flipped him over and climbed on top. It wasn’t as good as before. A problem surfaced with the rhythm; at first it felt syncopated, but soon it turned disastrous, like the ragged drumbeat of a high school marching band reverberating off buildings blocks away. James tried not to notice her frenzied eagerness to finish.
The sheets were soaked with sweat. They lay under the roar of the window unit. She appeared to be in oxygen debt. His own breathing was shallow and emphatic.
James, when he caught his breath, said, “Am I your lover?”
She said, “My dad did not die. He called me an irresponsible, spoiled rotten little bitch, though. He told me if I bounced another check he would see to it that I never got another penny from him as long as I live.”
He put his face to her side and listened for her heartbeat but heard only the air-conditioning unit, struggling to keep them comfortable. He kissed her rib cage, thinking of those things he liked about her: garage apartment, beach bike, ZZ Top. After the girl he’d loved left him, James had stopped eating. He thought she’d see him and understand how hurt he was and come back. It took over a year and twenty-two wasted pounds — it took until this moment in the sticky darkness — for James to realize how hard it was to love a crazy person.
“I fucked up,” she said.
“It’s okay. People fuck up. Also, people die.” He raised his head up, like a periscope. “I mean, you know that, right? Someday your dad’s going to really die.”
He felt the jolt of anger in her tightened muscles. “You said you’d die for me,” she said. “What were you thinking?”
“I guess I was thinking that maybe, at that moment, it was sort of true.”
She was silent. A different kind of silence from her — not sullen or bored, but rigid and anxious.
He got up to get dressed. In the dark, he found his way into his suit pants, his dress shirt. He stuffed his tie in his pocket and toed the gritty carpet in search of his flip-flops. A match scratched against a strike pad. She lit her cigarette and stared at him over the low flame.
“Okay, all right, you’re my lover,” she said to him.
“No,” said James. “I’m just an overdressed tourist.”
“There are worse things,” she said.
“Not in a beach town. Listen, I’m sorry I said that about dying for you and all.”
She smoked her cigarette. “I guess we’re even. Being that we’re even, do you want to get back in bed?”
He wanted to say that the seventies were over. But the seventies, or the end of them, meant nothing to her, and James understood that anything he said would be weighed against his one regrettable promise. He stood awkwardly by the door, knowing he had to say something, for despite what he’d whispered so many times in his head to the girl who had left him — you can’t just go around saying things — ames understood that was exactly what people did. They traded Chicago for New Orleans, muddy water for wine. They stood, like him, with their hand on the doorknob of a rented room, the air conditioner circulating words they fell back on like breath.
The Right to Remain
ON THE FIFTH PASS of the night, Sanderson pulled the car alongside the curb across the street from her house. He lit a cigarette, cracked his window. Focused his slitty eyes on the blinds in the neighbor’s windows, dared them to peek between the dusty slats. What the hell you looking at? I can see you, but you can’t see me.
Walter, riding shotgun, said, “Why we stopping?”
Sanderson stared past him at her house: a sprightly yellow bungalow he helped her move into the last time she’d left him. The previous owner had left a sculpture in the yard assembled from bicycle parts rearranged to create not a bicycle but an animal at once prehistoric and futuristic. It rose up in the tiny yard where Sanderson thought it better to plant a tree. He had never trusted it. He looked at it in disgust, then past it to the living-room window, dark save for a blinking visible in the back room where she slept. She kept the television on all the time now, he knew from the few disastrous times when he had broken down and called her. It gargled along in the background, a noise just white enough to compete with the buzz between his ears. There were pauses in her responses, when she bothered to respond to his questions at all, that suggested she was actually listening to prime-time television. The pauses lasted for years and were filled with the kind of impatience he felt when a fan
tasy of the two of them together again was interrupted by something trivial: a guy asking him for a light, a cashier naming the price of a purchase.
“Women always leave me in the winter,” said Sanderson. He tossed his cigarette into a neighbor’s yard and jerked the window up against the chill.
“Maybe you ought to move to a more southerly clime, chief,” said Walter.
“I ought to send that fucker my gas bill is what I ought to do. Many miles as I’ve put on this car lately making my rounds, seeing if he’s showed up yet. I ought to make him pay for an oil change at least.”
“Make his ass pay is right,” said Walter.
Sanderson said, “I knew a girl from New Orleans, she told me it gets cold down there. Real wet cold, too.”
“There ain’t no escape, is there?” said Walter. “You take your chances. It’s a risk, every time you hook up. Like you’re taking your life in your hands every time you unzip your drawers.”
Sanderson started to point out that it was not exactly your life you took in your hands every time you unzipped your drawers. Instead of arguing with Walter, a thorough waste of his precious time, he let himself consider the old boy, seriously. Why had he asked him along to ride shotgun in the first place? He told himself that he did not want to be alone and that he thought having someone along for the ride, a witness, might prevent him from doing the things he woke up each morning having already done in his sleep.
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